Why is this blog different from all over blogs?

Jews have been in the South for a long time -- a fact that seems to have escaped many New Yorkers who express shock when anyone Jewish speaks with a Southern accent. Indeed, the first Jews settled in south Georgia, where I grew up, in the 1730s. My family was not among them, of course. We made our way down the Eastern Seaboard in the early 20th century on my mother's side and my father joined the group after World War II.

So what does this have to do with lox and biscuits? Southern Jewish cuisine is unique, influenced by traditional Eastern European and Sephardic cooking, African cuisine brought by former slaves and the English, Scottish and Irish food traditions from the groups that primarily settled the area.

At my family's home in a small town in Southeast Georgia, Sunday night supper often consisted of "traditional" Jewish food such as lox, whitefish and herring, boiled potatoes and sour cream accompanied by a pan of buttermilk biscuits, baked by our beloved housekeeper. And, of yes, all of it was accompanied by achingly sweet tea served from a giant metal pitcher.

In this blog, I'm going to write about this food tradition, sharing memories and recipes. If you are interested in Southern Jewish food, please join the discussion.

BTW, Sweet Potato was my nickname from my father when I was very small. My Bubbie and others called me Shana Mammalah. Can you get much more Southern and Jewish than that?

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Everything's chicken, including the fat

Clipping recipes from old magazines recently, I was amused to see a recipe for chicken fat puff pastry in Bon Appétit.


Chicken fat is the oleaginous gold that makes an ideal replacement for lard in southern Jewish cooking. I was surprised to see it mentioned in a trendy cooking magazine. In an age when pork fat graces the menus of fabled “farm-to-table” restaurants across the country, chicken fat remains a relic of the last century. When unsaturated fat became the healthy cooking standard – was it the 1960s or 1970s? – chicken fat became passé.

Growing up Jewish in south Georgia, chicken fat was a refrigerator staple. We kept it in an old Kraft mayonnaise jar. Normally, the golden color of the fat distinguished it from the creamy white mayo. If you were in a hurry, however, there always was the danger of grabbing the wrong receptacle and spreading chicken fat on your tomato sandwich or dropping a dollop into your tuna salad.

The job of rendering the chicken fat fell to our housekeeper, whom we called Potty.

(Before you start entertaining visions of old retainers and stereotypical mammies, let me set you straight. In later years, this remarkable woman served on the local school board and was instrumental in bringing a vocational-technical school to our rural county. I knew her for more than 50 years. She was truly my second mother; we consider her family to be our family. We were connected for life, talking by telephone several times a month until her death earlier this summer. )

Every time she cooked chicken, which was quite often at our house, Potty would set aside the fat and excess skin and put it in the refrigerator. When she had enough, she would chop it up and place it in a heavy duty pot with chopped onions. She then would boil until the fat was rendered, turning to a golden liquid. The deep fried pieces of skin and onion created a delectable snack called gribenes , kind of the Yiddish version of pork rinds. The gribenes didn’t last the afternoon.

The liquid would be poured into the ubiquitous Kraft jar and would reside in the refrigerator until ready for refilling. The chicken fat replaced butter in mashed potatoes, was used to brown vegetables for stuffing and added flavor and texture to chopped liver. With butter for dairy meals and Crisco for baking and deep frying, it was the third of the trio of commonly used cooking oils in my childhood home.

Liquid Wesson oil was primarily used for my mother’s addictive salad, but that’s another blog post.

I assumed the method of rendering chicken fat had come down from my great-grandmother and grandmother. Bubbie kept her own chickens and probably had the freshest chicken fat in town – or in Vidalia, GA, perhaps the only chicken fat in town.

Of course, my memories of chicken fat in the 1950s and 1960s are fairly modern. The uses of chicken fat in our house were fairly limited compared to earlier times.

Some of my older Jewish friends wax elegiac about chicken fat and garlic spread on matzo as a Passover snack. And, similar to older Southern cooks who use lard in almost everything, chicken fat was their gold standard shortening.

If you breathed deep in their kitchens, you could experiencel generations of eastern European Jewish cuisine in the chicken and onion smells. The dishes may have been filled with saturated fat and salt – probably not a bad thing if you had to work to exhaustion and have enough weight to get through the winter – but they were delicious.

True confession time. I don’t have a jar of chicken fat in my refrigerator. I also don’t buy the suspicious blocks of frozen chicken fat in the freezer cases of kosher markets. In fact, I’ve never cooked with it. My husband Marc and I use olive and canola oils almost exclusively with an occasionally pat of butter for a dairy meal. That makes it much more difficult to recreate the depth of flavor transmitted by chicken fat.

Maybe that will change. New research suggests that chicken fat is more than 70 percent unsaturated, and, honestly, I can’t say that my ancestors had higher rates of cancer and heart disease than we do now.

Lard came back into fashion. Maybe chicken fat isn’t far behind. Chicken fat puff pastry could be just the beginning.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)